


Pars Plus Sans Moi

by myracingthoughts



Series: Lover Come Back [3]
Category: Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:41:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,580
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25032634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myracingthoughts/pseuds/myracingthoughts
Summary: For a long time I thought I would never see you again.The second post-snap snapshot of Fractionverse Clint.
Relationships: Clint Barton/Darcy Lewis
Series: Lover Come Back [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1773718
Comments: 10
Kudos: 44





	Pars Plus Sans Moi

Clint Barton opened the car door for her out of habit.

As the whole world seemingly crumbled around them, the archer had stopped and taken the time to open the passenger side door for her. It slipped, he slipped, but she didn’t say anything as she slid into the seat. And though he waited for her to call him on his chivalrous bullshit, she said nothing the whole ride to the building.

Darcy Lewis looked silently out the glass for more than twenty minutes (a record by his count), and, as much as he half-wanted to joke about it, nothing in that moment scared him quite as much.

She stared at the kids crying in the street, the people throwing bricks through windows, and the owners boarding up stores—blocks on blocks of chaos. By the time they made it Brooklyn, the phone lines were down. Clint wasn’t sure if it was the government starting to shut down local services to get a hold on riot control or just a heavier call load than usual, but somehow the wifi in his unit was still working.

Still no messages on the secure server by his quick check, but he tried not to think about it.

The building itself was mostly untouched, though there was a car on fire just across the street. Thankful he didn’t have to think about filing an insurance claim right now —if that would even still be a thing by morning— they wove through the halls to his place.

Once through the door, Clint struggled to get the security system all up and running for a full minute (what was that tertiary code again?). The broader protocols that covered the whole building and not just his unit were a little trickier to activate.

Darcy took the time to take her lab coat off, and he caught her biting her lip as she surveyed the space from the corner of his eye.

“Looks just like I remember it,” she said softly.

“Haven’t really changed anything since…” the double meaning didn’t escape him as the sentence died his lips.

It felt like a lifetime ago; two very different people standing in this same room having very different conversations. And arguments. The back-and-forths that went on until morning. He couldn’t ignore those memories, sweep them under the rug and pretend that they didn’t happen.

But even looking back, he liked to think the good outweighed the bad.

Glancing across the room, he spotted her out of her element. Darcy’s arms across her chest and the way she tucked her hands into her sides told him a lot more than she’d say out loud. He could sense the shivers coming before she showed them, teeth still latched onto her lower lip. She always did run a little cold (in everything but demeanour), but considering the circumstances, he wasn’t sure whether or not it was shock.

“Do you want coffee?” he asked, settling on something comforting and warm.

He took her nod and softened eyes as an enthusiastic yes, so he got to work as Darcy walked her fingers across the couch’s arm, like she was re-familiarizing herself with it. Besides the bed, it had probably seen most of her in their history.

Every piece of furniture in the place had at least one memory attached, he realized. Darcy left her mark on more than just him. There were days he’d be hit with a flashback to a tiff in the kitchen by the stupid purple spatula he’d shoved to the bottom of the drawer. Or the better memories dredged up by finding stray, long-dry droplets of nail polish on the coffee table.

Worst had been the day he’d found a museum brochure from a trip of theirs to Montreal —he’d had to go shish-kebab things with arrows after that.

“Still no word?” Darcy plopped herself down on the lumpy beast and carefully watched him as he shook his head. “When was the last time you spoke to them?”

Well, she wasn’t pulling punches with the questions. He tried to suppress his immediate reaction, silently cursing her people reading skills. It was made a little easier by the fact his back was still to her, hand in the bag of coffee grinds.

A part of him still wanted to shelter her from this layer of his life. To tell her everything was going to be just fine while he was drowning in nerves. The other part of him, the part that knew the world was ending, knew that if this was half as big as he thought it might be, there was nothing left to lose anymore. Clint cut his losses, dumped the grinds into the machine and turned it on before he spun to face her.

“Spoke to Nat a couple days ago when I was started to wrap up another bullshit goose chase in Hong Kong,” but he knew she meant the team. “Last team meeting…I- It’s been a while since I’ve been to one of those.”

The clinks of the mugs in his hands were a good distraction, giving him a few seconds to think over how to best answer. He wasn’t going to keep things from Darcy, he wasn’t going to sugarcoat it — Clint promised himself that much when she reached out to him in what he could only assume was desperation.

He’d barely had time to ask himself these questions.

“I might have told them I needed to slow down, to be here more… But I never thought they… they wouldn’t call,” he finished finally. “I didn’t quit if that’s what you’re thinking.”

It wasn’t what she was thinking; he could tell by the slight frown on her face. It was the one she used in place of pity. Sympathy maybe? He wasn’t used to that anymore. It was hard to be sympathetic towards a man who’d managed to get himself into most of his messes. More than a few of those messes had been at her expense, too.

And if nothing else, she’d known he wouldn’t quit because she probably knew him better than he knew himself, and he was pretty damn sure that he couldn’t really ever quit. It wasn’t in him.

“Clint, what happened?” she asked, abandoning the couch to lean on the counter beside him.

He knew she meant more than the team situation. He could  _ see _ her watching him, eyeing him up and down like there was a leak she was looking for. Like something was broken. It was the thing he dreaded on those late nights he almost called her —the explanation, the justification, the apologies that should have come a lot sooner.

Unable to easily explain all the mind-numbingly stupid ways he’d managed to screw this up for himself (and apparently the world), he settled on the most straightforward answer.

“I happened.”

_ I fucked it all up _ , he wanted to say like the depressed bastard he was. Would he even be Clint if he wasn’t such a stupid, brooding mess? Sometimes he wondered why he couldn’t slap a smile on his face and the be the guy with a wife and three kids, but then he remembered the life he chose.

The one that somehow put him in the center of this whole mess he didn’t quite understand.

“Hey,” she reached over, soft palm meeting the stubble on his face, nearly making him jump out of his skin at the surprise contact.

He’d forgotten how lost he could get in her eyes.

“You’re not allowed to beat yourself up, Barton. That’s the bad guys’ jobs, and sometimes your friends’.”

The corner of his lip unintentionally quirked up, “Smart ass.”

“I’ve been told I have one of those, yes.”

And while her voice was still a little worn, a little flat, he swore he could see a flicker in those stormy eyes, something besides the fear and anxiety that he could read a mile away. It radiated off of her, in fact. But just before he could say anything, his phone vibrated, shimmying across the coffee table.

“Nat?” he asked, tapping the speakerphone button in favour of his aids so Darcy could hear.

“Clint. Thank god. When I couldn’t get through, I thought…”

It was like he relaxed on a cellular level, tension pouring out from his muscles at the brief sound of her voice. If Nat was alive, if whatever this was hadn’t taken her, they had a fighting chance.

“What the fuck is going on?”

“You still have your Stark phone? Bring up the video chat.”

A couple of button presses brought Nat to life on screen, Darcy sidling up beside him to stare at the image. She’d unclenched her jaw, eyes a little brighter at the thought of them not being alone in this.

“Lewis.”

Clint couldn’t tell if Nat’s clipped tone was a result of the current situation or the thoughts swirling around how exactly the pair had found each other in this mess. Maybe a bit of both.

But either way, Darcy stood a little more rigid at the icy greeting and shot one back.

“Widow.”

“And I’m  _ Barton _ , but I think we all know that,” he sighed, tired of having to cut the confusing tension around them. “What happened? Start at the beginning.”

Nat retold the story as they’d figured it out, big purple guy and all.

“Thanos wanted to… to save the planet in some sick way,” Nat continued, looking down at what Clint could assume was the ground. “So he used the infinity stones, really powerful cosmic stones, to wipe out half of all life on earth.”

He couldn’t believe what he was hearing, but at the same time, the thought of some magical artifact being able to erase the universe wasn’t all that farfetched, not after what they’d already seen. And bad guys, well, bad guys always wanted to destroy things, usually due to some pretty twisted mental gymnastics and rationalization.

So that part made sense.

But the scale?

“Half?”

“The  _ whole _ earth?”

Darcy and Clint murmured at the same time, catching their own dead stares before looking back to the redhead. Nat seemed to give them a moment to process everything, nodding slowly… though they’d already known the answer.

He’d ask about some of this later, the details, the logistics of the day, and what the hell an infinity stone actually was, but for now. For now, it was enough to know that fifty percent of living things on this whole planet was unaccounted for.

Were they dead? Or were they missing?

Or even scarier:  _ who _ were they?

His blood pounded in his ears at the thought of asking that next, inevitable question.

“Who’s still here?”

Nat sucked in a breath, clearly also pained at the thought, “Me, Steve, Thor, Rhodes, Bruce, the raccoon…”

He couldn’t hold back a wince as his stomach dropped. No Sam, Tony, no Barnes, Vision and Wanda… That was a whole lot of influential players off the field.

“Wait, there’s a raccoon?” Clint couldn’t stop himself from saying the words, but looking over to find a sick looking Darcy wiped the incredulous look off his face.

The sombre silence on the other end of the line led to Natasha’s quiet question, one not meant for him.

“What about Jane?”

“Gone.”

Clint hardly recognized Darcy’s voice, gravelly and torn from the tears and uncertainty.

Natasha looked disappointed. And if her thought had been anything like his, he knew she’d have been hoping for some kind of scientific loophole that could bring back all those lost. But even in this singular conversation, the more she talked and the more lulls in exchange, the more Clint started to feel like this outcome was a lot more permanent than any of them would like to accept.

He settled his voice and added, “Are you coming back, stateside?”

It was a complicated question. Between international air space locked down, plane crashes, and governments on edge across the globe, it was a nightmare trying to get anything off the ground right now. And it didn’t help that a lot of Wakanda’s tech had been damaged during the fight with Thanos’s forces.

The short answer was yes,  _ eventually _ . The long answer was, who knew when international security would let up enough to allow for that kind of travel — never mind the legal and sociopolitical implications. The United States could close their border immediately; there was historical precedence that would even suggest it’d be the right move right now.

Never mind the fact that technically the Accords were still in play.

By now, Clint’s skin was hot and itchy. The uncertainty before him made his skin crawl. There was no plan; they couldn’t even talk about a plan. They didn’t even know what they were really up against here. They’d just watched their whole team turn to dust.

The whole world had watched someone turn to dust.

“I should’ve been there,” Clint sighed, free hand rubbing his forehead to shut up the shouting in his brain. “You should’ve pulled me out the minute you knew.”

Darcy’s cheek met his shoulder, grounding him a bit as he tried to push back the anger and the doubt. He almost flinched away from it, the phone rattling slightly in his grip. Her plan might have worked too, had his frustration not been so deeply rooted and long ingrained.

“You were just getting back from a mission, Clint. There was no time to brief you and bring you in halfway across the globe,” Nat tried to explain.

“Bullshit. It was a bullshit mission, and you know it,” Clint bit back. “You should have pulled me if you needed it, Nat. No matter what.”

He could feel a hand on his back, gently rubbing circles into his skin as she hunched over the phone in his hands.

“Clint this isn’t on you,” Nat snapped, suddenly frustrated with his self-pity. “As much as you don’t want to hear this, there was no way we were winning that. The odds were stacked against us from the get-go.  _ He turned back time _ to get Vision’s stone after it was destroyed, Clint.”

“I could have helped,” he whispered hollowly.

The redhead on the screen gave her patented ‘get a hold of yourself, Barton’ glare. A little more tired and a little more scraped up than usual. This wasn’t on her. He knew that, but it didn’t make him feel any better.

“We’re going to fix this,” Natasha assured. “We’ll get them back.”

She looked about as sure about that as Clint felt, but he gave a nod anyway, “Keep me posted.”

There were no goodbyes as the video feed cut out.

None of them could handle any more goodbyes right now.

Darcy lifted her head off his shoulder but barely looked up from the blacked-out phone screen in his palm. Eyes down and refusing to meet him, her fingers busied themselves by picking specks off her clothing. He knew something was wrong before she could say it aloud, but he didn’t want to push her.

Not after that.

“Well, it looks like the phone lines are back up,” Clint says. “In case you want to get a hold of anyone?”

Darcy shook her head, still too pale.

“Do… do you mind if I use your shower?” He barely heard her tiny voice above the dull voices and sirens coming in from the street. “I feel like I’ve still… still got dust on me.”

Oh, god. Clint can see the telltale wobble in her expression, the tears trapped between her lower lashes. He wants so badly to reach over and sweep her up, but her arms are across her chest and her shoulders hunched in signalled otherwise.

The shock was starting to set in, and she needed a safe space to let go.

He rubbed his clammy hands on his jean-clad thighs, trying hard not to think about the ash likely lingering there in his apartment. Trapped between the floorboards and the sofa cushions. It took him a few tries to get his voice to work again.

“Y-yeah. Of course. You know where the spare clothes are Darce.”

While she looked at Clint in confusion, she did. He hadn’t moved them since the last time she’d been over, even if that’d been over a year ago at this point. In fact, he hadn’t dared open that drawer since the night she walked out, so he was surprised when he strolled out of the bathroom in a ratty band tee (Clint’s) and a pair of leggings (not Clint’s).

He didn’t realize she’d left anything behind. Maybe it was better he hadn’t known until now. Might have given him too much hope in the moment. Acted as some sort of anchor that he could tie to her and draw her back.

Because even now, as much as this  _ so _ wasn’t the time, he realized he forgot what it was like to see her in his clothes. That hitch in his breath took him back for a split second to the first few months of them sneaking around. Reminded him of the quiet (and spectacularly vocal) moments in his loft, beneath, between and without the sheets.

But it’s her expression that brought it all crashing back down to reality. The pink skin from the too-hot water and scrubbing, the red-rimmed eyes from crying, the way she bunched the edge of his grey t-shirt between her fists.

“Do you need anything? I can see about taking a trip out later in case there’s something I don’t have here,” Clint offered, trying in earnest to make her feel a little more at home.

“Oh, no. It’s fine…” she mumbles with a sad smile. “I probably won’t be here long anyway.”

He could smell the dam burst before it had even broken.

“Darcy…” he’d said the name a million times before, but today it felt so different. “D’you have somewhere else to be?”

“Well, no, but you’re going to go try to fix this, aren’t you?”

She looked up at him with those eyes that look leaning more grey than blue or green, and his heart broke all over again. So that’s what this was about. His throat clenched at the thought she’d thought he would abandon her. Again.

He was up and off the couch in a heartbeat, pulling her into a hug as she sobbed. Clint expected her to push him away, expected her to come to her senses and tear him down a peg or two. But the snide comment never came, and instead of a shove, her fists burrowed into the back of his sweater.

A muffled “I’m sorry” reverberated against his chest as she tried to compose herself, and he hushed her gently.

_ He _ should be the one apologizing.  _ He _ should be the one that made her feel safe amongst the chaos outside.  _ They _ should not be here in this place, in this time, in this situation.

But when do things ever go according to plan?

“Darcy, I would  _ never _ leave you behind. I’m sorry I ever made you feel that,” he murmured into her hair, her shampoo’s bright citrus scent flooding his senses. Familiar.

Popping her head out slightly, she rasped, “You didn’t… I just… Superhero stuff, you know?”

He held her at arm’s length, hoping the short distance between them and the threat of eye contact would make his point hit harder, maybe sink in.

“You’ve always been priority number one, Darce. I know I was bad at showing it.”

“And saying it. Out loud, especially,” she sniped with a watery chuckle in proper Darcy form.

“Yeah, but I care about you.”

He thought back to her frantic text messages, frowning slightly at how much concern she’d exuded in so few characters. How worried she’d been that he wouldn’t respond.

“I know, but world-saving trumps lab rats ten out of ten times,” she said quietly, eyes downcast again.

He huffed a humourless laugh and shot back, “Well, in case you haven’t noticed, I haven’t been doing a whole lot of world-saving lately.”

“You saved me.”

“Yeah, I guess I did,” he murmured noncommittally. But that pit in his stomach, the one opened up with the thought of Darcy being unconvinced he’d take care of her. “Darce?”

Her fingers were still wound in his sweater, tugging on the drawstrings as she fidgeted. He caught her hands in his own and drew her against his chest again, just trying to hide the tremors starting to creep in. The intrusive thoughts were circling around again, and he just wanted to feel her close. He wanted to make her feel safe and cared for, and like she was worth saving just as much as the world.

Even if it was just for a few moments. Until the world came crashing down again.

“Yeah?”

“You know I love you, right?”

He could tell he’d caught her off guard. The hitch in her breath and her sudden stillness in his arms told him as much. It had been a while since he’d said it out loud, and the last time those words had left his mouth, he’d been a lot more upset than now.

Two people. One year. A lot can change to people, places and things in 12 months.

And as he sat there wondering if he’d overstepped and she was finally going to lay the Darcy smackdown on him, she finally met his gaze.

“I know.”

**Author's Note:**

> * _Title translates loosely to ‘don’t leave without me’_
> 
> The next work will be in the past, as we learn a little bit more about how they got here.
> 
> As always, thank you for reading! All comments and kudos are loved and cherished.
> 
> You can also find me on [tumblr](https://pasmonblog.tumblr.com), where I post a lot of comic book content, work updates, and behind-the-scenes commentary.
> 
> Title credit: [Pars Plus Sans Moi by: Gabrielle Shonk](https://open.spotify.com/track/7ozmJ6ZI2paB9asnTWnvWe?si=-FLZWoPNQYSyXtWlpnU8Bg)  
> (she’s a bilingual musician with some beautiful English songs on this record as well)


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